José Mercado
My wife, Ynez, and I were both brought into the world by way of Puerto Rico, me in 1950, and she five years later. Not long after we were married, I enlisted in the navy. I always wanted to do something heroic. With the navy, I traveled to Vietnam, Grenada, the Persian Gulf, and Bosnia. I was injured in Bosnia, which requires me to use a walker now. But I came home. I came home. And that is all any soldier cares about.
I love the esoteric things in life. My father used to call me an aesthete. He meant it not as a compliment, of course. He was disappointed by my interests and by the fact that they were not the same as his, which were farming and raising livestock. He believed a man should work hard with his hands, that toil and sweat were evidence of a virtuous life. He did not appreciate that I wanted to read books and that I saved money to buy an easel when I turned fifteen and that I would spend the afternoons painting pictures of trees. The only time he was proud of me, in fact, was when I joined the navy. He was an old man by then, nearing death, but I still remember his face when I told him, the way he had smiled with those teeth of his that were brown around the edges, the way the wrinkles rippled up to the surface of his cheeks.
Ynez was not as happy about it. She supported me, but she was worried. We never had children. We knew from the outset and in a terribly selfish way that our interest lay only in each other. So when she was home during my deployments, she was there alone, and the weight of the solitude depressed her, I think, and gave her wide-open plains upon which her mind would wander, allowing her too much time and space to think about what might be happening to me as well as whether and when I would return.
When I came back from Vietnam, she wept at my feet. I saw clearly the toll it had taken on her. But I wasn’t ready to leave the navy. I had witnessed the sort of atrocities during the war that threaten to steal a man’s soul. I saw that humans are no better than any animal or brute, and in many cases might be infinitely worse. But often in the span of the same day, I would be restored, too, by the courage of men. And I had come to understand my father’s perspective about the gratification of feeling useful, of being in the world under the most demanding circumstances, and learning that I could not only survive but thrive, and that my body, the physical presence of me, could have import.
So eight years later, I left again, but this time while I was away, I wrote Ynez letters. If she heard from me with enough regularity, I thought, it would ease her worry. Over the years, over the subsequent deployments, I sent her hundreds of letters. I wrote two or three a day sometimes. They began as a way to save her, but they saved me also. They helped me to make sense of the things I saw, and from that, I began to make sense of the world and my place within it.
I read a lot of poetry in those days. I took small chapbooks overseas with me, chapbooks bound by staples with covers that were little more than construction paper. I copied the poems down sometimes and included them in my letters. Ynez used to tell me I should write my own poetry, but just because you have the requisite admiration and even ambition to do something doesn’t mean you’re up to the task of performing it yourself, which was the case for me. I am good at being a reader of poetry, but not at much beyond that.
My eyes have turned against me now, so I am resigned to listening to books on CD. Sometimes Ynez reads poetry aloud to me. I no longer have any of those chapbooks that used to keep me company in so many far-flung places. I usually burned them after I finished them, just to lighten my load. But Ynez borrows books from the library and we sit on the couch and she covers me with an afghan and draws her slender feet up onto the cushions and I close my eyes while she reads.
There’s an American poet named Marvin Bell who emerged in the late sixties, during the height of the Vietnam War. He has a beautiful poem called “Poem After Carlos Drummond de Andrade,” which is a reference to the great Brazilian poet. I love the part that goes:
And it’s life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory, because you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall with the nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes, though it is winter and you are swallowing the dirt of the town.
And then this portion at the end, which means everything to me:
Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your heart, and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time, and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is sweet—your face flushed, your chest thumping, your stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you apart in her arms.
Alma
After we told her that she couldn’t see Mayor anymore, Maribel grew moody and sullen. I had witnessed a hint of the same thing ever since Mayor had been grounded, but now it was worse. She hardly spoke. She nodded or shook her head. She held out her hand to indicate that she wanted something. She sat on the ledge at the front window and stared across the parking lot with her chin planted on her knees.
Once, nearly two years ago, Maribel had insisted on painting her fingernails black. She and her friend Abelina hid away in her room and painted each other’s nails, and when Maribel came to the dinner table that night, we saw it.
“What did you do to your hands?” Arturo asked.
“I painted my nails,” Maribel said, grinning and holding her fingers out like a fan.
“Is it permanent?” Arturo asked.
“It’s just nail polish, Papi.”
Arturo looked at me as if to ask, Is this something we should be worried about?
I had learned by then that Maribel liked to think of herself as a rebel. And yet she managed only small insurrections. She stayed out too late with her friends. She walked through the middle of the boys’ soccer games in the street, impervious to their shouts for her to get out of the way. She painted her fingernails black. And she did it all playfully, good-naturedly, in a way that made it impossible to be angry at her.
At the dinner table, she wiggled her fingers in the air and said, “I think it looks cool.”
Arturo glanced at me again. This time, Maribel saw him.
“What?” she said. “It’s okay to be different.”
“Of course it is,” I said.
With a depth of feeling that was lost on her, Arturo said, “We would love you no matter what. Because you’re ours.”
Maribel tucked a bite of her cuernillo relleno inside her cheek until it bulged. She chewed loudly, smacking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Would you love me if I ate like this all the time?” she asked.
I watched Arturo fight a smile. “Yes,” he said.
Maribel swallowed and curled her lips back with her fingers. “What if I looked like this?”
Arturo grinned. “Yes.”
She tensed the muscles in her neck until every tendon rose to the surface beneath her skin, like strings under a drooping tent. “What if I walked around looking like this all the time?”
“Maribel, stop it,” I said.
Arturo looked right at her, struggling to keep a straight face. “No matter what,” he said.
It was still the truth, but the way she was acting now had me worried. She had been showing so much improvement—the latest report from the school had said that Maribel could easily answer questions and follow prompts, and that her attention span had increased—and I hoped we hadn’t just undermined all of her progress.
“Do you think we did the right thing?” I whispered to Arturo one night when I couldn’t sleep. I shoved him awake and said it again.
“What?” he asked.
“About Mayor and Maribel? Do you think we did the right thing?”
“It’s the middle of the night, Alma,” Arturo said.
I glanced to where Maribel lay, curled up in the sleeping bag, her hair spread like a veil over her face, then I turned back to Arturo. “It seems like it’s only made things worse.”
Arturo rubbed his eyes. “We’ve talked about this already. You heard what Quisqueya said.”
“We don’t even know if she was telling the truth.”
“Mayor admitted to his parents that they were in the car together. You’re the one who was so upset about that part of it. ‘He knows he’s not supposed to be outside with her,’ you kept saying. As if that was the worst of it. Being outside together?”
“You don’t know what it’s like out there,” I said quietly. “You don’t know the sorts of people who are out there.”
“What people?”
I looked at his disheveled hair, his heavy eyes fighting the dragging tide of sleep. I said, “Never mind. Let’s go back to sleep.”
“We did the right thing,” Arturo said. “She doesn’t know what’s best. Especially not now.”
“What does that mean?”
“A year ago it would have been different.”
“A year ago you would have let her be with Mayor like that?”
“A year ago we weren’t here. She wouldn’t have known Mayor. But if there had been a Mayor in México, then maybe.”
I stared at him, piercing holes through the dark. “Why don’t you just say what you mean?” I asked.
He was quiet.
“Say it, Arturo.”
“Say what?”
“Say whether you’re upset about Mayor and her because she’s your daughter or because she’s your brain-damaged daughter.”
“I never used that word.”
“Say it,” I insisted.